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This is an update of an earlier post where explained how to easily get set up to play video with the Nvidia ION chip that comes inside this tiny little Revo box. As of 30th May 2010, version 1.0 rc3 of Mplayer is shipped with support for VDPAU output and is available in Ubuntu's multiverse repositories. More information at Mplayer's website here.

I have had a number of these machines come through my hands over the last couple of months and they are really great. The Intel Atom chip is a little crappy but is supported by the Nvidia Ion graphics processor. I got a couple of them bundled with Windows Vista pre-installed and I have to say the performance was a little sluggish, perhaps it was because I only booted into Vista once just to have a look, I gave it half an hour and still hadn't been able to open up a website or load a video, I don't know, it wasn't faulty in anyway... I also got a couple bundled with the new Windows 7 Home Premium edition which seemed to be much faster to start up and easier to use. Performance wise I can't say anything here because I didn't really play with it much. One of the Vista Revos was delivered with a wierd Wii-mote like device that could be used to play the bundled game 'Sonic Heros', it was impossible to control and the graphics appeared nowhere near as good as the Gamecube. Anyway, I installed Ubuntu 9.10 and used the Restricted Hardware Drivers utility to install nvidia-drivers and settings. This was fine, but when it came to playing video, the machine just could not cut it. I was getting a very choppy output when playing 720p video using VLC. This was down to the video decoding not being performed by the ION processor. So, from there, here are the steps I took to make it happen. Ubuntu is meant to be easy to use and hence this setup is easy to achieve using the utilities provided by default with Ubuntu (Software Sources Utility, Restricted Hardware Drivers Utility and the app-store like Add/Remove Applications utility). You can get your Revo set up playing HD video without having to hack around without using the terminal and without playing around with text files. I added this PPA using the Software Source utility: Nvidia Vdpau Team PPA Then ran the Restricted Hardware Drivers utility and selected nvidia-graphics-drivers-195 I logged out, then logged back in, then continued to install SMplayer. Using SMplayer I selected the following output driver (vdpau) in Preferences > General > Video And now the Revo can play 1080p h.264 encoded video very smoothly keeping CPU usage below 10% at all times. I found using mplayer without the gui the CPU usage would sit at about 1% all the time. I tested using the 1080p h.264 encoded copy of Big Buck Bunny. It looks great. Apple also have a gallery of sample HD h.264 encoded video here. The above applies to both the Acer Aspire Revo 3600 and 3610 models. The best deals to be had I have found on ebuyer.com here and here.